Stirring Photos Chronicle the Final Years of the Space Shuttle Program

The Space Shuttle Discovery is rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building aboard its Mobile Launch Platform at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Two astronauts walk across the gantry and away from the space shuttle Discovery during a routine practice evacuation in March 2010 for the STS-131 mission. Seven astronauts would ultimately lift off aboard Discovery from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida the following month.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Work lights illuminate the Space Shuttle Discovery as it awaits its flight.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Sean King installs covers on one of Discovery's engines in Orbiter Processing Facility 3 shortly after the shuttle landed in Florida last year.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Astronaut Rick Mastracchio sits on the edge of Discovery's hatch during training in the launchpad's "white room," the last stop for astronauts before they enter the shuttle.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

The Space Shuttle Endeavour is lifted inside the Vehicle Assembly Building before being mated to its external fuel tank and Solid Rocket Boosters. The VAB, built to house the Saturn V rocket that took Americans to the moon, is one of the largest buildings in the world. It sits on eight acres and rises to 525 feet.

Three technicians photograph Atlantis as it is towed into the Orbiter Processing Facility, or OPF, after its final flight into space.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

The "stack," two solid rocket boosters mounted to the external fuel tank, sits in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in February 2010. The boosters would eventually be joined to Discovery.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Aerospace technician Al Schmidt on the flight deck of Discovery in 2010. Technicians had to check and double-check all of the switches to make sure everything worked on launch day.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Autographs of astronauts, employees, family members and specially cleared visitors, such as senators and sports figures, are scribbled on the wall of the white room in OPF 3. In this image, the white room is connected to the open hatch of Discovery.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Astronaut Alvin Drew posed for a picture on the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center during Terminal Countdown Training. A month later he flew the Space Shuttle Discovery into orbit.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

A view of Discovery's open cargo bay from inside the flight deck of the orbiter.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

A shuttle technician crawls through the hatch of Discovery while preparing it for flight.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Solid rocket boosters fire as the space shuttle Atlantis lifts from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on November 16, 2009.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

The Final Space Shuttle, Atlantis, heads for the International Space Station after 30 years of Space Shuttle Missions.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

The Space Shuttle Endeavour approaches the runway at the Kennedy Space Center to conclude its final mission into space.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

The Space Shuttle Discovery lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida after returning from the International Space Station. Discovery delivered a multi-purpose logistics module filled with science racks that were transferred to laboratories on the International Space Station.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

The Space Shuttle lifts off from the pad.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Spectators watch as Atlantis arcs through the sky. Five shuttles — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour — flew 135 missions over 30 years and were the first reusable orbital spaceships.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

Smoke clears from the launchpad after a successful flight.

Photo: Philip Scott Andrews

A wise photo editor once said that sometimes the most interesting photos don’t happen at the football game. They happen in the parking lot. It’s easy to get caught up in the action and forget that everything surrounding the action can be just as revealing.

Case in point is Philip Scott Andrews’ ongoing photo series Last Days, which documents the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle program. For three years Andrews has had unprecedented access to the Kennedy Space Center, and he’s made good use of it by capturing a side of this facility the public is not used to seeing.

“A lot of people when they hear NASA they think about guys in white lab coats,” Andrews says. “The astronauts are fascinating, but there are only a couple of them, and then there are thousands of workers who are making this possible.”

The historic program, officially titled the Space Transportation System (STS), performed its last launch, the Atlantis shuttle, on July 8, 2011. The program’s vehicles, the only winged aircraft to ever enter orbit and return for multiple uses, are now being decommissioned and placed in museums for future generations to experience.

It seems appropriate to capture the passing of this iconic era of human scientific achievement in Andrews’ grainy black and white, a choice he made explicitly for its timeless quality. Andrews’ dad was a photography consultant for the aerospace industry and, like many people from his generation, was profoundly moved by the achievements of NASA.

“The Space Shuttle has a lot of symbolism for what this country used to be and for what we were able to produce in-house,” he says. “I wanted this to be my love song to the space age, if that’s not too cheesy to say.”

Instead of perseverating on the few remaining launches, Andrews wanted to reacquaint the U.S. with the scope of its achievement by turning his camera toward the program’s more everyday moments and characters.

“A big problem with the Space Shuttle was that it became too consistent,” he says. “The American people stopped seeing it as a difficult task. They made it so ordinary that it lost its sense of adventure.”

By forcing people to re-see all that goes into maintaining and launching a shuttle, Andrews helps get at the heart of something that truly changed the country as we know it. Something he thinks we need to achieve again today.

“I think that projects like [the space program] make us a better country,” Andrews says. “Whether it’s going to the moon or achieving energy independence, these projects always lead to research and discoveries that we can’t even estimate now.”

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If you’re in New York next week, be sure to catch the opening of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum’s Space Shuttle Pavilion, which will include the Enterprise, on July 19.

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